The Good, The Bad
and The Uncomfortable

originally
published in Arts Professional magazine (issue 187, February 2009)

What’s popular isn’t always good.
What’s good isn’t always popular.

Right
now, 43 children are in detention at Yarl's WoodImmigration Removal Centre. The Children's Commissioner for England
criticised
the government for violating the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and
their lack of humanity in treating these young children. Among the suicides
there, is a father who killed himself to allow his son to be able to stay here
safely at least until 18 years old. In 2008, over 1,500 migrants died trying
to enter a European country.

In 2002, Gurinder Chadha’s film
“Bend It Like Beckham” broke box office records in the UK to become the
top-grossing British-financed and -distributed film ever. An astonishing
achievement, considering that in the 80’s, when race issues invaded the
post-punk era of the Thatcher years such an achievement, or even to make such
a film, would not have been possible. With the UK apparently having ‘moved
on’ from such race tensions this feel-good insight into the positive progress
of now familiar Asian families in a western context won the hearts of swathes
of British audiences.

Feel-good narratives sell well,
and the best of these can achieve both artistic recognition and insightful
portrayal. Yet what of those bleaker narratives which audiences have been
brought up to shrug at, and the authorities would rather didn’t get seen? How
do principled and humanitarian arts managers, commissioners or programmers
deal with this imbalance while under pressure to maximise audiences?

Soon after founding the artists
group Virtual Migrants, I saw “The Bogus Woman”, a rare play which cut through
the norm and dealt with the appalling experience of a female refugee going
through the detention system. This enduring play is, according to The
Independent, “essential watching for its cutting indictment of the way in
which we, as a society, fail those who rely on us for fairness, freedom and
compassion.” Lisa Goldman who commissioned the play sees “the role of art as
being to engage in areas of public debate and provoke questions." According
to the writer Kay Adshead, “I could not believe that the violation of human
rights of vulnerable people was happening in England … I have written it
because I hope it will give people an insight into what it can really be like
to seek asylum in this country. I also hope it may change minds.”

Over the years since then there
has been considerable support for arts connecting with the ‘refugee
experience,’ and in our changing world of increasing conflicts, inequalities
and depleting resources, the need to migrate will increase. Yet many people
seeking asylum understandably want to avoid being contentious, to avoid the
tougher side of their experience for a range of reasons, and while this can
lead to valid and enriching cultural and artistic development, as well as to
dismantle the ‘gritty’ stereotypes, it can also unavoidably play into the
favoured feel-good territory.

Luckily, committed and experienced
artists from ‘established’ communities are exploring those challenging
experiences of people escaping intense and life-threatening instability, with
films such as the harrowing Ghosts being recognised examples. Such work has a
strong pattern of collaboration with the people in question, or of the artists
seeing themselves as a mouthpiece for those experiences. As Benjamin
Zephaniah said of his novel Refugee Boy, “…everything
in the book comes from other people’s experiences. In a way I don’t really
see myself as the author of this book, I just collated these people’s
experiences and put them into one character.”

These approaches and motivations
have been central to the work of Virtual Migrants, a small organisation with
no regular funds whose ongoing purpose is to explore narratives underpinning
race, migration and globalisation. The additional key perspective which
defines us is our commitment to examine the causes of the conflicts and
economics which drive migration and underpin the more commonly highlighted
systemic human rights abuses. Along with The Refugee Project’s publication “How
UK Foreign Investment Creates Refugees and Asylum Seekers,” this
leads to the piecing together of an uncomfortable jigsaw.

A 5-year phase of our video, digital
art, music and cross-artform collaborations has been published in an unusual
multi-format box set entitled Exhale. Working within a visual art paradigm
the works explore a range of sub-themes such as
the links between the war on terror and the war against asylum seekers; school
children’s campaigns for fellow pupils; resonances between slavery and modern
migration contexts; and the legal categorisation of people as refugees or
asylum-seeking migrants which demeans their rights.

The collaborators involved vary in
their background and identification with the issues, involving a mixture of
migrants and non-migrants encompassing a range of displacement experiences.
While it is true to say that such personal identification fuels our
motivations, equally there is a basic empathy and humanity for everyone to own
and participate in. Ken Loach was once asked why a white, middle-class,
Oxbridge male like him makes the films he makes, to which he retorted “what a
ridiculous question!”, stating that anybody can be moved by injustice,
inequality and suffering and has a right and duty as a global citizen to
address those issues.

Such injustices are a red rag to a
bull for an increasing number of artists for whom the uncomfortable option
takes first place and creative work develops relationships with dynamics
outside the ivory arts bubble. Virtual Migrants, for example, maintain
structural links with ASHA (Asylum Support Housing Advice), a local
organisation which avoids the feel-good and chooses to specifically support
asylum seekers with refused applications who can be homeless and destitute.

In 2003 the British Council’s “A
Sense Of Place” international conference was a landmark event at which Virtual
Migrants were given a key platform. This took place at a rising peak of
interest in arts, refugees and displacement, and it remains to be seen how
long such support can maintain its focus, and whether the range
of arts practice working with the cultures and issues involved can develop
into a strong movement. While a sense of intangibility continues despite the
conference, that there is a movement is beyond doubt along with a sense that
it is gaining momentum.

Global issues affecting us all
have never been so visible, the desire for change never so strongly
articulated. “Playing safe” may define the recession and for professionals
working in the arts it may be seen as suicide to think otherwise.
Nevertheless, the question has to be asked as to whether we are building a
better world free from injustice, and the answer to that might be both
uncomfortable and unpopular.